Libyan Baseball

I love baseball. Not playing it of course. Much too dangerous. I love to watch it. It reminds me of Saturday afternoons in the '60s, Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek calling a game on the old black and white Westinghouse, Uncle Bernie (not our real uncle) spending an hour screaming at the players and umpires. Bernie had anger issues and blown ego boundaries, so it was a relief when the beer hit him and he fell asleep. We would all doze off then, and that's what I love best about baseball: The naps.

I was a lazy kid, so my father convinced me to play baseball the same way he got me to do anything: Against my will. He was in the Air Force and got sent to Libya in '62. That's where I learned to play the game. Libyan baseball is the same as American baseball, but without grass or rainouts. There was plenty of sand, which has a way of slowing down the game. Imagine playing baseball on the beach. A line drive would arrive at its normal speed, but we would dive out of the way in slow motion. We did everything in slo-mo. We jogged the base paths in slo-mo. We ran into each other in slo-mo. We shook sand out of our underwear in slo-mo.

I enjoyed the game for a while because I've always been a fan of slapstick. It's funny when other people get hurt, as long as they don't really get hurt. Then came the Billy Peterson incident. When a ball came near him, Billy actually ran toward it. He would throw his entire body in front of it. Very strange kid. On this occasion, a ball flew his way in center field, and instead of doing the logical thing—i.e. watch it drop, dig it out of the sand and throw it halfway to the guy standing behind second base, Billy tried to make a running catch. Big mistake. You see, desert plants are extremely stubborn. Extracting them from an entire baseball field by the roots is next to impossible. Maybe our dads loved us, but not that much. In short, Billy tripped on one of those pesky desert stumps—in slo-mo of course, and his timing was thrown. He caught the ball with his face and went down. Naturally, I started laughing. He didn't move. Not so funny. We watched them carry him off the field. At our next game they told us his dad got transferred back to the states. Until then, we thought Billy was dead. Maybe he was dead, and they lied, just to trick us into going back out there. They were so bored waiting around for a shooting war, they would do anything for cheap entertainment. Sadistic? You bet. But let's remember, without sadists we would have no masochists, and without masochists, no one to play baseball.

In '64 I get traded to Michigan, and I'm forced to play in the rain now. It takes quarter-sized hail for them to call off a game. The grass is nice, but grounders are as dangerous as line drives. I'm taking balls off the ankles and shins in addition to the line shots. The outfield was relaxing in Libya. Here, grounders never stop, and they expect me to chase them all the way to the fence.

Baseball is teaching me about the trade-offs in life. I play some first base, and the footing allows me to easily avoid the ball. However, I have to fall on a slab of concrete. That same ball would have hit me in Libya, but I would have fallen into a pillow of sand. This reminds me of the latest gag they've come up with: Sliding. Have you seen this? Please, unless I'm falling off my bike, don't expect me to slide on a sidewalk.

Fifty years later, we own a flat screen Hi-Def Samsung. I have to endure Joe Buck and Tim McCarver on Saturdays, but at least there are no lunatic uncles making me nervous. Sure, watching baseball brings back painful memories from my playing days, but there's always the payoff: the sandman calls, and it's time for another nap.